Meetings Coverage

With Somalia’s nine-year transition complete, upholding its “remarkable” progress, new President, leaner Parliament and calmer security landscape required, now more than ever, urgent and sustained support to ensure further successes following two decades of conflict, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General told the Security Council this morning via a video link from Mogadishu.

Today’s debate on women’s rights and perspectives was critical for achieving gender equality, a goal that should receive wide support in all corners of the world, General Assembly President Vuc Jeremić told the Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) today, pledging his readiness to engage with delegates on all such issues during the sixty-seventh session.

The Sixth Committee met this morning to take up five requests for observer status in the work of the General Assembly, of which two had been deferred from the Committee’s sixty-sixth session.

Discussions for a proposed conference on ridding the Middle East region of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction would be difficult and the path would be long, but the “prize” — the security of the region and the world — would be worth the time and effort, the First Committee (Disarmament and International Security) heard today.

Given the “warning signs of a fading two-State solution”, the international community must not let the Syrian crisis and other changes in the Middle East divert its attention from a dangerous stagnation of the Israeli-Palestinian situation, the top United Nations political official told the Security Council this morning, ahead of a debate that heard from over 45 speakers.

The Fourth Committee today, having considered the question of decolonization in depth since its began its session on 8 October, forwarded 11 draft texts to the General Assembly, with half approved without a vote, reaffirming the rights of the people of Non-Self-Governing Territories to shape their destiny.

The elimination of the persistent and continued violence against women throughout the world was a core element for achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment, the Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) was told today, at the start of its three-day discussion on the advancement of women.

The work of UNCITRAL was essential to upholding the rule of law and could only be realized when States put binding legal texts into action, Hrvoje Sikirić, Chairperson of the Commission’s forty-fifth session, told the Sixth Committee (Legal) as it considered the Commission’s report and concluded its debate on two additional items: criminal accountability of the Organization’s officials and experts on mission; and the administration of justice at the United Nations.

Millions of poor people around the world deserved the best and most serious efforts from the international community, stressed United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson today, as the Second Committee took up operational activities for development.